Rescuing The Reporters « Clay Shirky: Now the half-dozen reporters covering the City Council and local crime instead of antiques and sports don’t do their work in a vacuum. The city desk editors and the copy chief make the work of Janese Heavin et al. more valuable than it would otherwise be. But you can pick any multiplier you like for necessary editorial and support staff and that number, times six reporters, won’t be a big number. In particular, it won’t be 59, or anywhere near it.
This is, I want to emphasize, the staff for a pretty good paper, in a competitive market. (Ann Arbor, another midwestern college town and just a bit larger than Columbia, doesn’t have a metro daily at all. And there’s nothing wrong with reading your horoscope or being reminded by Granny that May really is one of the nicest months of the year. Anyone who wants to read that stuff should be able to.
But it’s not news, and it’s not hard to do, and it’s not hard to replace. No one surveying the changes the internet is bringing to the newspaper business is saying “My God, who will tell me about Big 12 football! Where will I find a recipe for spicy chicken wings!” What matters in the Tribune, and what’s at risk, is Terry Ganey’s work on a state coverup of elevated levels of E. Coli in Ozark lakes, Jonathan Braden on anti-gay protesters from Kansas picketing in Columbia, Jodie Jackson’s reporting of on a child molestation case against a local politician.
For people who see newspapers as whole institutions that need to be saved, their size (and not the just the dozens and dozens of people on the masthead, but everyone in business and operations as well) makes ideas like Coll’s seems like non-starters — we’re talking about a total workforce in the hundreds, so non-profit conversion seems crazy.
All that changes, though, if you start not from total head count but from a list of the people necessary for the production of Jones’ “iron core of news,” a list that, in the Columbia Daily Tribune’s case, would be something like a dozen. (To put this in perspective, KBIA, Columbia’s NPR affiliate, lists a staff of 20.)
Seen in that light, what’s needed for a non-profit news plan to work isn’t an institutional conversion, it’s a rescue operation. There are dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model. With that framing of the problem, the question is how to get them out safely, and if that’s the question, Coll’s idea starts to look awfully good.
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